The Gothic Times

Issue date: 4/28/09 Section: Art

Media Credit: Laura Krapacher Artist Priscila De Carvalho with her installation at JCM.

This March, the Jersey City Museum converted their Atrium Gallery into a metropolitan web of city life with Priscila De Carvalho's most recent installation work, Passageways. Opening March 19 and running through August 22, the exhibition stands as De Carvalho's largest and most aggressive work to date. The piece, which is 10-feet long and 35-feet wide, consists of common household materials such as rubber tubing, paper, photographs, and foam.

De Carvalho described her work as, "simple materials, ranging from vinyl and wire to shoe boxes and paint, used to convey the urgency and energy of building community with what is at hand. In these inner cities I create, there a sense of vastness of the communities that look out from thousands of windows every day, while raising the question of whether the condition of poverty will also be infinite."

At first glance her work can seem overwhelming, with makeshift telephone lines of tubing crisscrossing back and forth over the poster board and shoe box tenements stringing inches over your head. Long distorted staircases cascade down the sides of buildings mimicking the stairs coming down through the mountain shantytowns. These two dramatic elements create interconnectivity of generational and geographical poverty. Littered throughout the substitute towns are ominous red denizens engaged in various activities. De Carvalho intertwines her two worlds and captivates the audience through beaming colors of city lights and Brazilian carnivale.

Priscila De Carvalho, a self-trained artist, was born in Curitiba, Brazil and immigrated to the United States during the early 1990s. Featuring in exhibitions throughout the New York area, Carvalho has made herself a staple in politically progressive installation art. Graduating from The Arts Student League of New York in 2006, Priscila has gone on to receive The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, The Aljira Emerge 10 Fellowship, and The Immigrant Artist Outreach Initiative Program all in 2008.

Since 2005, Carvalho has presented her work in nearly twenty group exhibitions. Passageways stands as her first solo work and is described by the Jersey City Museum as, "conveying the complexity, chaos and paradoxes of contemporary life that affect America, as a continent, in the age of globalization. While addressing the great ills of humanity such as war, poverty and drug trafficking, the installation also reveals a side of humanity that also hungers for joy and happiness...concepts of inversion and transformation allow a life without hope to become, however briefly, a life without limits."

Priscila De Carvalho: Passageways is on view at Jersey City Museum March 19 through August 22, 2009. Jersey City Museum's gallery hours are from Wednesday through Saturday 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $4 for adults, $2 for students. Admission is free for all on Thursday evenings from 5 to 8 p.m.

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